Working With Grief Through Junk Journals
Junk journals have been around for years, but the practice of pairing them with grief-focused quotes has become more common recently. I have put together quite a few of these myself, mostly for clients who wanted something tactile to work through loss. The approach is straightforward, though it does require some care in how you select and integrate quotes. The basic method involves pulling quotes from books, old letters, or curated collections, then layering them into your journal pages along with other ephemera. Coffee-stained paper, dried flowers, ticket stubs – whatever you have on hand. The quotes themselves tend to come from poets like Rumi, Mary Oliver, or contemporary grief writers. Some people source them from online archives, others cut them from old books they find at thrift stores.
Where to Find Junk Journal Quotes For Grief
I mostly compile mine from a few reliable sources. Books like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi are commonly mined for passages. There are also websites like Grief.com and The Compassionate Friends that publish memorial quotes you can use. Poetry Foundation's archive is another decent resource if you want something literary rather than clinical. For actual download files, there isn't a single comprehensive free library I can point you toward. Most people end up building their own collection over time, which honestly works better than any pre-made pack because you know exactly what resonates with you. That said, sites like Creative Market and Etsy sell curated quote printables for junk journals, usually ranging from free to about twenty dollars for a full set. Here is the part most guides skip: not all grief quotes land well on every page. I learned this the hard way when I was working on a journal for someone who had lost a child. I pasted in a quote about "time healing all wounds" from an old greeting card I found. It looked fine in isolation. On the page next to photos of the child, it felt completely wrong. The person who received that journal shut it down and couldn't look at it for weeks. I replaced it with a simple blank page and a pressed flower instead. Sometimes less gets the job done.
The technical side is not difficult, but there are a few things that trip people up. Acid-free glue sticks work fine for most paper quotes, but if you are working with heavier cardstock or metallic printables, a gel medium or Mod Podge holds better. The quotes will still lift at the edges if you skip this step. I use a light spray of matte medium over finished pages to seal everything down without changing the texture. Another counter-intuitive detail: darker, more somber quotes often perform better on lighter backgrounds rather than dark ones. It sounds backwards if you think about it visually, but high contrast makes the text readable and gives the eye somewhere to rest. I initially tried going with white ink on dark paper for a mourning theme and ended up with pages that were just hard to read. People give up on the journal after a few pages because they can't engage with the words easily. One practical workflow I settled on: spend about fifteen minutes gathering quotes before you start constructing pages. Sort them into piles by theme – acceptance, anger, memory, gratitude. Then pick one theme per spread. This keeps the emotional arc of the journal from becoming a messy jumble, which is something I see a lot in beginner journals. They pile on every quote that catches their eye and end up with pages that feel chaotic rather than contemplative.
Get the Full Details
If you want a starting point for your own collection, try keeping a document open while you read or listen to things. When a line stops you, type it out with the source underneath. It takes maybe thirty seconds per quote and builds a personal archive that actually means something to you. Generic quotes downloaded from the internet lack that context, and you can usually tell when someone has copy-pasted without any real connection to the words. The main limitation with this whole approach is that it only works if you actually engage with the material. A junk journal full of grief quotes sitting on a shelf does nothing. The value comes from the act of selecting, placing, and writing alongside those words. I would say it takes roughly two to three hours per completed spread if you are doing it properly, but some of that time is just sitting with the quotes and deciding what fits where. I do not recommend this for acute grief in the first few months after a loss. People need something gentler then, not a project that demands emotional labor. By month six or so is usually when the journal format starts to feel useful rather than overwhelming.
For the quotes themselves, a handful that tend to work well across different situations include lines from C.S. Lewis about grief being the price we pay for love, passages from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross on the process of mourning, and anything by David Kessler about meaning-making after loss. The exact wording matters less than picking something that aligns with where you actually are right now. There is no single right way to do this. The journal should reflect your own voice and your own relationship to the person or situation you are processing. Quotes are anchors, not the whole structure.
